Suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge
New barriers have eliminated
suicides at other landmarks around the world, but were opposed for the
Golden Gate Bridge
Suicides
As a
suicide prevention initiative, this sign promotes a special telephone available on the bridge that connects to a
crisis hotline.
More people commit
suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge than at any other site in the world. The deck is approximately 245 feet (75 m) above the water. After a fall of approximately four seconds,
jumpers hit the water at some 76 miles per hour (122 km/h). Most jumpers die from impact
trauma on contact with the water. The few who survive the initial impact generally
drown or die of
hypothermia in the cold water.
An official suicide count was kept, sorted according to which of the bridge's 128 lamp posts the jumper was nearest when he or she jumped. By 2005, this count exceeded 1,200 and new suicides were averaging one every two weeks. For comparison, the reported second-most-popular place to commit suicide in the world,
Aokigahara Forest in Japan, has a record of 78 bodies, found within the forest in 2002, with an average of 30 a year. There were 34 bridge-jump suicides in 2006 whose bodies were recovered, in addition to four jumps that were witnessed but whose bodies were never recovered, and several bodies recovered suspected to be from bridge jumps. The California Highway Patrol removed 70 apparently suicidal people from the bridge that year.
There is no accurate figure on the number of suicides or successful jumps since 1937, because many were not witnessed. People have been known to travel to San Francisco specifically to jump off the bridge, and may take a bus or cab to the site; police sometimes find abandoned rental cars in the parking lot. Currents beneath the bridge are very strong, and some jumpers have undoubtedly been washed out to sea without ever being seen. The water may be as cold as 47 °F (8 °C).
The fatality rate of jumping is roughly 98%. As of 2006, only 26 people are known to have survived the jump. Those who
do survive strike the water feet-first and at a slight angle, although individuals may still sustain broken bones or internal injuries. One young woman, Sara Birnbaum, survived, but returned to jump again and died the second time.[
citation needed] One young man survived a jump in 1979, swam to shore, and drove himself to a hospital. The impact cracked several of his
vertebrae. On March 10, 2011, 17 year-old Luhe “Otter” Vilagomez from Windsor High School in
Windsor, California survived a jump from the bridge, breaking his tailbone and puncturing one lung, though saying his attempt was for "fun" and not suicide.
Engineering professor
Natalie Jeremijenko, as part of her
Bureau of Inverse Technology art collective, created a "Despondency Index" by correlating the
Dow Jones Industrial Average with the number of jumpers detected by "Suicide Boxes" containing motion-detecting cameras, which she claimed to have set up under the bridge. The boxes purportedly recorded 17 jumps in three months, far greater than the official count. The
Whitney Museum, although questioning whether Jeremijenko's suicide-detection technology actually existed, nevertheless included her project in its prestigious
Whitney Biennial.
Various methods have been proposed and implemented to reduce the number of suicides. The bridge is fitted with
suicide hotline telephones, and staff patrol the bridge in carts, looking for people who appear to be planning to jump. Iron workers on the bridge also volunteer their time to prevent suicides by talking or wrestling down suicidal people. The bridge is now closed to pedestrians at night.
Cyclists are still permitted across at night, but must be buzzed in and out through the remotely controlled security gates. Attempts to introduce a
suicide barrier had been thwarted by engineering difficulties, high costs, and public opposition. One recurring proposal had been to build a barrier to replace or augment the low railing, a component of the bridge's original architectural design. New barriers have eliminated suicides at other landmarks around the world, but were opposed for the Golden Gate Bridge for reasons of cost, aesthetics, and safety (the load from a poorly designed barrier could significantly affect the bridge's structural integrity during a strong windstorm).
Strong appeals for a suicide barrier, fence, or other preventive measures were raised once again by a well-organized vocal minority of psychiatry professionals, suicide barrier consultants, and families of jumpers after the release of the controversial 2006 documentary film
The Bridge, in which filmmaker Eric Steel and his production crew spent one year (2004) filming the bridge from several vantage points, in order to film actual suicide jumps. The film caught 23 jumps, most notably that of Gene Sprague as well as a handful of thwarted attempts. The film also contained interviews with surviving family members of those who jumped; interviews with witnesses; and, in one segment, an interview with Kevin Hines who, as a 19-year-old in 2000, survived a suicide plunge from the span and is now a vocal advocate for some type of bridge barrier or net to prevent such incidents from occurring.
On October 10, 2008, the Golden Gate Bridge Board of Directors voted 14 to 1 to install a plastic-covered stainless-steel net below the bridge as a suicide deterrent. The net will extend 20 feet (6 m) on either side of the bridge and is expected to cost $40–50 million to complete. However, lack of funding could delay the net's construction.
Golden Gate Bridge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Now, I'm not "that guy" who needs his own talk show to rant about our government, and I don't plan on starting a militia. But I don't trust most of the politicians much. Their motives must always be questioned. Time and time again there a huge bill pushed through Congress, and then you find that the author of the bill has $500,000 going to his home state for something few people knew anything about.
